Established in 1969, the Contemporary Culture Collection (CCC) is a source of primary research materials documenting social, political, economic and cultural history as it pertains to minority groups, the counterculture, and the fringe. The CCC includes small press journals, newsletters, and newspapers, books, and pamphlets as well as microfilm, sound recordings, posters, broadsides, and related ephemera.

A strength of this collection lies in the organizational records of underground or alternative press publications that provide alternate source of information and perspectives on contemporary issues. These include the Liberation News Service (LNS), an alternative news agency active in the 1960s and 1970s that documented Third World politics and the American social and political protest movements of the time period; the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers, a small press clearinghouse; G.I. Papers, underground antiwar newspapers produced by and for enlisted members of the U.S. Armed Forces; and Seven Days and the Socialist Review, both of which published social and political focused periodicals with commentaries on issues ranging from civil rights and abortion to migrant labor, gay rights and nuclear disarmament.